The
Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach
is Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's version of film
biography. The film presents biography as the rewriting and juxtaposition
of prior documents; in this instance music and a chronicle are most
prominent. Defined in this way, through a range of documents, Bach does
not emerge as a conventional dramatic character. The importance of music
in the film, which was performed and recorded during the filming rather
than dubbed, stresses its centrality to the contemporary knowledge and
appreciation of the historical figure Bach. In fact, Straub has said that
the music was considered the basic raw material of the film, and not
simply background accompaniment.

Personal aspects of the composer's life are presented, along with
the musical performance, through the agency of a diary. A voice-over
narration, purportedly reciting the text of Anna Magdalena's
journal, provides information about financial and familial affairs in a
matterof-fact monotone. No such chronicle really exists, and the narration
was constructed from various sources including letters written by and to
Bach. However the actual status of the spoken text is less important than
its effect in the film as a document.

Through the use of these prior texts as its basic structuring principle,
the film constructs a biographical portrait while asserting its distance
from its subject. In line with this approach, the film refuses to engage
the viewer emotionally in its characters as psychologized individuals. To
undermine any sense of realistic depiction, the actors are dressed in
period costumes but do not visibly age in the course of the film. The film
as a whole is visually austere and verbally reticent, and the music stands
as the major mechanism of viewer involvement. The actors rarely speak and
the narration is void of emotional sentiment. This "silence"
is expressed in several visual pauses punctuating the film; two shots of
the sea, one of the sky, and one of a tree intervene in the course of the
film. These images serve as moments of meditation. Removed from the
musical, familial, and financial concerns developed in the narrative, they
offer the possibility to speculate on, among other things, the relation of
these images to the filmic depiction of Bach's life; the
relationship of nature to social and cultural life; and the nature of
cinema. With regard to the latter, Straub is known for quoting D. W.
Griffith: "What the modern movies lack is the wind in the
trees."

The framing and lighting convey an almost academic sense of beauty, a
calculatingly striking surface that denies the depth of space or
character. While many of the images involve composition-in-depth, they are
often so extreme and self-conscious that their status as artificial
constructions—through the conjunction of set construction, lens
choice, and character placement—is obvious. In addition, various
camera and lens movements frequently manipulate and shift apparent depth
within the course of such shots. The formal contrast and counterpoint
guiding the editing are often seen as the visual counterpart of the
structure of Bach's music. However, this approach to editing,
insisting on the process of spatial construction, is characteristic of
Straub and Huillet's films. It is a way of underscoring the
artificiality of the film's visual world.

—M. B. White

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